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SSA prepares to open doors of new $200 million data center

Ask the CIO

The Social Security Administration's new data center is almost finished after
nearly two years.

The effort to upgrade the agency's network infrastructure is the focal point of
many of the technology improvements SSA is working on in the short term.

"We are merely a month and a half away from where we take possession of the new
building. The building, itself, has come in under schedule and under budget, and
at high quality. So we will begin the migration once we have the keys to start
moving services over to the new data center," said Bill Zielinski, the Social
Security Administration's chief information officer. "We are really looking
forward to that time when we can take advantage of all the things the new
technology will provide us."

Zielinski said SSA isn't waiting for the launch of the new data center to
look at storage in the cloud or greater use of virtualization. In fact, he said,
many of those new technologies were prerequisites before moving into the new data
center.

"We didn't want to simply move the old platform into a new, enabling building. We
really have a mindful plan that says our future state includes these sorts of
things, which includes cloud-based storage solutions, which includes a much
greater level of virtualization. We've already begun the transition, so when we
move to the data center, it's in this new future state and not in this past
state," Zielinski said. "There are other advantages the new center will allow us
to do, and it really comes into moving into more 24/7 types of services that, with
the structure we will have in the data center, we will be able to explore."

SSA awarded Hensel Phelps Construction a $192 million contract in January 2012 to
build a new data center in Urbana, Maryland. It will replace the current data
center in
Woodlawn, Maryland, which was close to capacity in 2012, according to a SSA
inspector
general report.

SSA also struggled to ensure it backed up its data properly and adequately,
relying on older technology that could take days to retrieve key information if
needed.

The agency has been improving its network backbone, awarding a $233 million
contract in 2012 to CenturyLink to upgrade how it manages data. It also hired
Verizon in 2009 under a separate $140 million deal for a wide-area network and
to transition the external portion of it to a modern IP platform.

While the data center is almost complete, Zielinski, who came back to SSA in 2011 after a brief
stint with the Office of Personnel Management, is focusing on a number of other
priorities as well.

He said cybersecurity and meeting the needs of the citizens by moving more
services online are his top two.

A major piece to the citizen services effort is the My Social Security
website, where the agency is moving more and more applications over the
coming year.

"There will be a lot of focus to make sure we are providing good, strong and safe
services that people can use, and it provides them a lot of choice," Zielinski
said. "Rather than having to go into our field offices, people can go online and
in a very timely, safe way get the work done that they need to."

He added part of the impetus for moving more services online is the potential for
cost savings. If SSA can take more and better advantage of online services, then
it can move funding to other mission areas.

"We are putting up some of these mobile application services to be able to enable
people to take care of those things that are those types of transactions that lend
themselves to mobile," he said. "With that said, we also are looking from a design
perspective as we move into the future and as we look at constituting those online
services, rather than having to do development specifically toward mobile or
specifically toward online, whether it's a laptop or a desktop. [We are] taking a
look to say rather than having to design to a specific target, we are doing things
that can move and shift to any of those. It's a flexible design that allows it to
be consumed on just about any device because they will change."

Of course, all of this is dependent on SSA securing the networks and data in its
systems.

Zielinski said SSA is a constant target of hackers and bad actors because of the
money it pays out and the personal information it holds. He said cybersecurity is
a constant challenge and priority for his office.